Sumários
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28 Outubro 2020, 09:00 • Rita Sousa
5 students by zoom conference
Social Justice and Human Rights are typical expressions of postwar Western societies. The social revolution of the 19th century, the prospect of a victory of the proletariat over the capitalists and their state, was replaced by the fair distribution of the benefits extracted from the exploitation of the Earth and its resources. The image of the exploited workers in revolt was replaced by the Soviet state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, in one hand, and by social consultation between bosses and workers, under the aegis of the state, to negotiate the part of the increase in the wealth that would go to pay wages and to pay investments, in the other hand. The revolution was institutionalized in bargaining processes around just outcome. Workers become human resources (to be explored) and citizens (with the right to vote, access to consumption above subsistence).
The rights of political participation won by the bourgeoisie under the French Revolution were extended to workers, as Habermas refers to in the text quoted in the program. The 1948´s declaration of human rights at the UN was an update of the French Revolution's declaration of human rights. Will it be this time that all people will become de facto equal in access to the minimum conditions of dignity (not being in such a precarious situation that does not allow them to make decisions about how to organize their personal lives)?
Experience shows that human rights are both hope and frustration. Although human rights institutions have multiple, under the protection of the UN (and the Council of Europe) and the ILO (International Labor Organization), including special higher courts, such as the European Court of Human Rights and their equivalents in other continents, the specialization of human rights separate from defense and internal security policies, as well as from trade and industry policies, allows violation of human rights under wars, police persecutions as well as under political and economic purposes. This happens in the poorest and farthest countries, away from Western culture, and it also happens in the richest and most powerful countries (cf. Assange's case, among others).
The specialization of human rights in various directions, in the search to protect vulnerable populations, such as women, children, migrants, and their families, the first people, the prisoners, reveals at the same time the vigor of human rights´ social movements and the existing ignorance about the sources of these discriminations. Discrimination continues to spring as industrial assets, meanwhile, human rights´ activists and institutions can only help in rare cases.
Amartya Sen, a disciple of John Rawls, recognized the limitations of justice produced by the courts and pointed out to the need to produce effective economic and social mechanisms in the realization of "capabilities" produced only by care and love raising children by adults and families and communities free from threats to their physical and mental integrity.
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21 Outubro 2020, 09:00 • Rita Sousa
ZOOM FOR SEVERAL STUDENTS
The expression of globalization became a topic of debate in the social sciences, after the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. The USA became the only superpower in the world and its model of economy and life became hegemonic. At an economic level, there was no more talk about the "development", about developing countries (which was a very common talk regarding the Third World - the first world was the Western world; the second world was the sphere of communist influence). Globalization substitute development kind of talks. At the political level, talking about totalitarianism and its negative connotation stoped. Emerge instead the talk about the "there is no alternative" (TINA) talk.
The expression globalization started to be used in academia in the 90s and lost its shine with the Trump´s election as president of the USA, 2016. The superpower that promotes globalization, through its influence with the institutions of global governance (UN; WTO; BM; IMF; WHO; OECD, etc.) has turned its back on globalization, recognizing the political and economic failure of the past decades. Namely, the new politics choosed to abandon the idea of "global village" to resume Cold War strategies, with Russia and China, meanwhile transformed into capitalist powers (this eventes followed the war against radical Islam and terrorism in the name of Christian fundamentalism, war declared by George W. Bush, Blair, Aznar in 2003, at the Azores summit).
The work of conceptualizing the expression globalization encountered serious difficulties: did globalization begin when the first humans left Africa or when the Portuguese kings organized the Discoveries or only in the 90s? Thatcher and Reagan's neoliberalism, the ideology of globalization, was imagined by Hayek, the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974, and put into practice in politics in the following decade, before the end of the Cold War. There is, therefore, a lot of antecedents of globalization before the expression started to be used. For example, the 20th century inter-war crisis, which enabled the United States to become the empire's new seat, replacing England, ushered in the era of military stability and economic growth in the West. Later, the oil crisis in 1973 led to a change in the social contract between the sharing of income between labor and capital for the new strategy of stagnating labor income and the maximum increase in capital income. It coincides with this time the beginning of the consumption of non-renewable capacities on Earth higher than the Earth's regeneration capacity.
Currently, political and economic elites speak of the system's reboot, orienting themselves ideologically to combat climate change (green economy) and to support the development of technologies (digital economy). The idea that technologies solve the problems created by the socio-economic system, the Western way of life, the consumption of fossil energies, has its origin beforethe 1980s. It was a reaction of the elites to control the emergence of ecological movements. For one hand, ecological ideas were censored (since the 1960s, there is scientific consensus on the risk of global warming, but this does not show in politics or in the media). On the other hand, ecological ideas were recovered using the taste of humans regarding mechanical crafting and the alleged need for economic growth to solve the problems of poverty (which persist and worsen).
In the academy, prepared to train professionals and avoid political problems - the elites are free to deal with them as it please them -, globalization becomed a real "thing", instead of an expression. Naturalized, globalization were dissected among its technological aspects (transport, information and communication networks, biotechnology, etc.) economy aspects (capitalism as the only way of to survive) political aspects (naturalization of international and social hierarchies of privileges and stigmatizations), cultural aspects, social aspectes, and so on. Globalization is presented as a spontaneous result of the evolution of human life, the zenith of progress, the best of all possible worlds. Such an apology is so obvious that become akward. There were those who completed the image of globalization with "another world (another globalization) is possible", like sociologists as Boaventura Sousa Santos or Michael Burawoy, using and inspiring processes of unification of social movements (failed, until now). People concerned with the "social" found it useful to organize (since 2001) the World Social Fora, in contrast to the World Economic Fora in Davos (which bring together economic and political elites from around the world, in an exercise of post-Cold War globalization).
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14 Outubro 2020, 09:00 • Rita Sousa
ZOOM FOR SEVERAL STUDENTS
Social Justice is a sentence with two components: the normative part and the social part.
The idealized society, for example, as a party or as an elite, can be the representation of a future social justice for all. For that purpose, everyone is called to sacrifice today, as it is the main understanding in China (and everywhere else also). Another way to look at social justice is conceiving an atomized society, made up of juxtaposed individuals, all different from each other. Society must give priority to the "more" people (more creative, rich, competent, famous, etc.) and punish or develop charity to the losers, at the same time, hoping that way to impose them better behaviors. Another idea of society is what remains of the action of corporatipons on the world regulated by national states and the international community: working people and their existenctial problems, like having shelter and food, raising children, get hill, dying, etc. In this third perspective, there is no need to decide whether social justice is collectivist for the future or individualistic for only a few. It is a question of organizing resilient institutions to social and ideological conflicts, seeking to respond to complaints on one side and the other, for the bettering of the general modus vivendi.
Justice is a theme associated with law, institutional processes. The social refers to the unification of nationals, under the nation-states. Law professionals know society badly and very badly - they deal with how things should happen and are far less interested in knowing how things happen. Social workers, especially those in economics, are much less interested in knowing how things should be. Above all, they want to know how to do what needs to be done to achieve practical results, as eternal economic growth and profits, and taxes to support corporations and states.
Social justice was not a concern at the time of Roi Soleil, Louis XIV, the king of Paris who became King of France. He achieved this through the policy of establishing a monopoly on the use of violence for his retinue: "The State is I", he said. In the 17th century, with the construction of Versailles, Louis XIV seduced all the French nobility to live in the luxury of Versailles, paid for by the income from colonization (slavery, transportation, international goods), under the threat of hostility from the King against nobles who do not accept the kind invitation. On the other hand, joining the court meant sharing the funds withdrawn from the imperial enterprise. Even today, this inclosured "social justice" and social pacification mechanism is working, both at the elite and the salariate social levels.
The Court Society, the people who learned to live in luxurious seclusion, ended up, with Louis XVI, getting to know a reaction of the populace who made the French Revolution. Hunger contrasted with opulence. The injustice of a society that took all resources for itself and abandoned its neighbors and subjects was contested. Social justice started to be a problem. In 1848, more than half a century later, hunger was again a catalyst for popular revolts, and the struggle against aristocracy and bourgeosy disconnected from the reality of people's lives. Without social justice, in particular, without cheap food, accessible to all, the risks of popular misery bother aristocratic and bourgeois exploration plans for the Earth. Even today the main EU policy is the common agricultural policy, that is, subsidies for food products.
Social justice, the fight against poverty and social inequalities, became an expression used to refer to the promises of well-being and dignity, which Human Rights after the Second World War also promised.
Habermas tells the story of the evolution of the modern state in terms of the different paradigms of how laws work. Juridification is the expression it uses to refer to the processes of dissemination and incorporation of legal norms imposed on populations in an increasingly intense and detailed manner, with its benefits (of independence from people from each other, all equal before the law) and their difficulties (in how school and judicial authorities, or others, are called upon to intervene in situations they are unaware of and have neither the time nor the will to know, making the intervention of justice agents and the law possibly negative for people who allegedly should be protected and defended).
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7 Outubro 2020, 09:00 • Rita Sousa
ZOOM FOR 1 STUDENT
The course´s subject to judge as objectively as possible the impact of globalization on social justice and human rights. For this purpose, one needs a clear idea of what these 3 controversial notions mean and, at the same time, a reflexion on their mutual relations.
Is it possible to be objective? Is there a truth about this? Is this truth revealed - by religion or philosophy - or is it a scientific truth? Adding this discussion on these 3 notions, there is another one: what modern science is? Science is usually said to result from a philosophy and religion turn. Science produces universal application of truth under empirical testing. Additional question: are the social sciences similar and as effective as the natural sciences?
The class was dedicated to discussing the notion of social justice. Novak's text presents a concept of social justice centered on the person and on discrimination between more and less creative people. The most creative should be specially protected and supported. They should be free to do what they want, even at the expense of the least creative people. The achievements of the most creative people - self-made men, innovative entrepreneurs, great leaders, etc. - offer mankind models of behavior that, when replicated, will favor raising the standard of living for all. This concept is especially appreciated in the USA. In China, social justice is the purpose of the Chinese Communist Party's action plans. In 2050, if everything goes as planned, Chinese socialism will be mature in that country. Social justice is each and everyone collaborating with the PCC in obtaining this result so that the planned achivements become real. Another concept of social justice is institutionalist, the most recognized in Western Europe. Social justice, from the institutional point of view, will be the identification of injustices and the construction of institutions capable of minimizing or even abolishing them. Instead of believing in individual effort or collective direction, institutionalism observes the difficulty in achieving the planned results over the individual or collective will. There is the dissonance between what each person thinks and says and what she does and, even more so, with the practical results of social action. Institutionalism takes the best possible suggestion for achieving social justice at every moment. Political struggle determine the goals, the resources assigned to carry these goals out. Managers and staff are assigned temporarily to achieve these goals, under the scrutiny of evaluating systems results. According to evaluation, it is possible to reorientate institutions. In Africa, the notion of social justice seems to be far from the main political concerns in most countries.
While it may be useful to understand different civilizational attitudes in different continents towards social justice (we did not speak about Muslim civilization), it is certain that all these concepts presented in a simplified way have supporters on all continents and are known everywhere. One lives in the age of globalization, in the age of globalization of information. There are individualist, collectivist and institutionalist theories and ideologies everywhere, mixed together.
In addition to the ideologies and histories of each continent and country, the notion of social justice is also seen differently depending on the cognitive discipline. John Rawls, for example, thinking like a lawyer and speaking to lawyers, drew up a concept of justice as fairness. It started with the idea that the economy (and society) always produces inequalities. He conclude that the courts should interpret the law and the results of its application as fair when legal decisions do not increase inequalities and, if possible, reduce them. His pupil and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, an economist, developed Rawls' theory in the sense of economics: justice is to increase as much as possible the capacities of autonomy (capabilities) of all and every people. Both of these theories are liberal, that is, they conceive people as a priority over society, a priority that collectivists invert.
Regarding the confrontation of COVID-19, it is easy to observe the difference in policies between China and Europe and the USA, corresponding in some way with the theories of social justice exposed here. It is more difficult to know whether the elderly are being treated well or poorly or whether mental health is being served by the people's containment and movement control policies. Or to understand the formation of movements of resistance to the announced vaccines. Or to decide what to do knowing that our lap tops include slave children work.
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30 Setembro 2020, 09:00 • Rita Sousa
100% PRESENTIAL
Presentation of the website of the course and of its rules.
The epidemic goes hand in hand with other global phenomena, such as the far right-wing wave in politics (is it populism or neo-Nazi-fascism?), the difference in economic growth in different parts of the world, the financial crisis of 2008 that became the new financial normal.
Xenophobia, for example, has been stimulated by several policies, such as the war against radical Islam (2003), the punishments against the peoples of Southern Europe (corrupt, lazy, alcoholic, and over-sexed) (2010), discrimination in migrations (sale of expensive national documents, on the one hand, and purchase of immigration stoppage services in North Africa and the Middle East, on the other hand), criminalization of people in an irregular administrative situation, applying arbitrary death sentences to those who fail to be rescued of the Mediterranean.
Is the pandemic part of a complex and general process that can only be understood confusingly? In reality, it comes as a disease, as new health policy, as a new form of age discrimination (the elderly, the youngest), and workers discrimination (the indispensable workers, the dispensable workers), as a new strategic priority that stopped being directed economically and started to be directed by of public health criteria?
Is the pandemic a unique, unprecedented phenomenon that needs to be looked at as such? No teaching from the past can help us to understand what is going on and what to do?
One may note two approaches to science: the particularistic and specialized, in which environmental and historical contexts are dispensed with; another one is holistic and historical, in which contexts are also discussed. Anyway, scholars and commentators refer to their déjà vu feeling when they look to the current situation: an apparently inescapable advance of the retaliation feelings centered on scapegoats, and violent political practices that intend to do justice by their own hands.